Double basses quiver and swirl on a note so murky it is hard to hear the pitch. A lone trumpet ascends in a three-note sunrise through an octave, followed by a cataclysm of thundering drumbeats. Add to that the evolution of the human race, man, superman, illness, death, transfiguration, a levitating Latvian maestro and a flying baton dropped somewhere amid the cellos and this was Symphony Hall, Birmingham last Thursday night, the CBSO's first major concert of the year – broadcast live on Radio 3 and repeated last night. When that baton's owner is Andris Nelsons, always excitedly athletic on the podium, players are no doubt used to ducking these identified flying objects.

The opening bars of Richard Strauss's monumental, Nietzsche-inspired Also sprach Zarathustra may have won fame in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but this symphonic poem is yet mightier, more intriguing and orchestrally adventurous than the film's unforgettable soundtrack suggests. Once heard, that first spectacular aural idea never returns in this 30-minute score, written in the 1890s for a late-Romantic orchestra aggrandised with extra horns, low woodwind, tubas, two harps and extravagant percussion.

This exhilarating concert, which started with Strauss's youthful Tod und Verklärung, had the unimpeachable bonus of Stephen Hough as soloist in Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 1. Hough, always a high-risk, high-intelligence performer, who swings round to stare hard at the orchestra in pause bars as if fearing distraction from the audience if he looks the other way, played with a mix of flexibility, muscle and taut, spare poetry. Moments of jazzy loucheness offered an implicit reminder that Scott Joplin died the year this revised work was completed, 1917. Rachmaninov gave the work's premiere in New York two years later, by which time he had left Russia to live out his days in melancholy exile.

As well as formidable motor skills, Hough has seductive tactile power, restoring rigour to this wistful but sometimes mushy concerto. His elegant hands flapped and fanned so invisibly fast at times, as in the whirlwind Scherzo, that you lost all sense that he could possibly be restricted to the 10 digits and 54 bones with which the rest of us, manually speaking, make do. In a few million years evolution may catch up with Hough and we'll all be playing with his facility and speed, so it's just a matter of patience.

Last week also marked the start of Symphony Hall's 21st birthday season, with a rare out-of-town visit from the Royal Opera on Wednesday for a concert performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger – a work of civic pride if ever there was one. This gilded celebratory season, with high-profile visitors as well as a strong CBSO programme, is worth booking fast. The hall, which opened in April 1991, remains the UK's finest, with a perfect acoustic admired around the world. Usefully you can get back to London after a standard-length concert, even without HS2.

The Bavarian town of Bamberg, a medieval and baroque gem (which we did not bomb), has many similarities with Birmingham, though wholly different in size and style. Its concert hall opened two years after Symphony Hall and though less ambitious has a similar feel. Comparisons have been made between Simon Rattle and his 18 years' dedication to the CBSO and Jonathan Nott, the British conductor who arrived as chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in 2000 and has effected a quiet musical revolution there. Resisting glamorous guest conducting offers he has consistently raised the Bamberg SO to ever greater international prominence. That he and his orchestra have been chosen to perform the Ring at the elite Lucerne festival in 2013, Wagner year, is proof of his success.

Serious but highly imaginative in performance, Nott – who, born in Solihull, gave his first solo performance as a boy treble with the CBSO in Fauré's Requiem – marks up his score with an array of coloured pencils, refusing to leave any detail to chance. On the podium his feet are as rooted to the ground as Nelsons's are balletically airborne. Somehow Nott manages to hurl himself from waist, head, torso into the body of the orchestra, precise with every cue but inspiring a fiery response, with warm strings and ardent woodwind, even if brass sounded briefly unhappy.

His ongoing Mahler series, available as live recordings, has won high praise. Last weekend it was the turn of the Sixth Symphony (1906). How can such a nice, kind man write such cruel and unpitying music, one listener asked the composer at an early rehearsal. Mahler's reply goes to the heart: "These are the cruelties that have been inflicted on me and the sufferings I have had to endure."

Squeezing every ounce of emotion from the score, Nott placed the disputed Andante after rather than before the coruscating Scherzo, making its tragic, major-key simplicity all the more affecting. The work's total impact was shattering: the queue for coats afterwards appeared peopled by ghosts. Proms and Edinburgh appearances aside, Nott remains too little known here. Perhaps like Sir Colin Davis, who spent years in Germany before storming home in his glorious prime to head a British orchestra (the LSO), Nott will do likewise. Someone in the UK must snap him up soon.

The sad news this week was the announcement that Thomas Quasthoff, 52, the German bass-baritone, is to retire on health grounds. Suffering severe disabilities as a result of being a "thalidomide baby", Quasthoff has overcome obstacles to achieve stardom, performing regularly with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. If you want to sample his singing, try "Ich habe genug" on his Bach cantatas CD, with its quietly anguished oboe obbligato.

The oboist is Abrecht Mayer, who comes from Bamberg and who began his career in what is now Nott's orchestra. Mayer is in the Berlin Philharmonic, where his co-principal is Jonathan Kelly, who started out with Rattle and the CBSO just as the plaster was drying on the new Symphony Hall. Not all roads from Bamberg and Birmingham lead to Berlin or vice versa. But the networks which link musical life, especially if there's a "B" involved, may be more enmeshed than we realise.